


fermenting in fermata

by gogollescent



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-30
Updated: 2011-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As children, Raven and Charles experiment with alcohol and foreshadowing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fermenting in fermata

The first time they got drunk, Charles was twelve.

They conceived of the scheme while hiding from the Xavier household’s execution of Thanksgiving, for which the kindest thing that could be said was that there were no actual guillotines involved, and carried it out three days later, when the last of the relations had left the premises. There was some discussion of the plan in the intervening period, and a certain amount of moral equivocation, but by the end they had come to agreement, having settled all ethical considerations by means of the kind of pure, unarguable logic in which the pubescent specialize.

Charles’ reasoning ran like this: had they been in England, as they had six months ago and would again, it would have been perfectly legal for them both to enjoy a convivial drink among family. Therefore, it might as well have been legal to have a drink there in Westchester, since geography had nothing on the intrinsic dignity of man.

Raven’s reasoning was somewhat simpler, and went thusly: if the store owner really didn’t want alcohol sold to children, he would have trained his cashiers to ID even the hairiest of old men. After all, one never knew what could be lurking under the skin.

Unless one was Charles, Charles pointed out.

“Shut up and help me with this cork,” Raven replied. She rippled out of the man in question’s bearded face, and shrank, until she was crouched blonde and grinning and eye to eye with Charles.

He reached over. “Give it here.”

Eventually, after several more silent passbacks and the unhygienic application of Raven’s impressive teeth, they got the cork out. Also about half the contents, to Charles’ dismay. It was all right for Raven, who could be wearing dry clothes again in the blink of an eye, and was; but Charles was left to pick mournfully at his shirt and suspect very hard in Raven’s direction that the jacket was ruined.

Why you were wearing a jacket to start with, I don’t know, Raven thought.

“Because,” said Charles, aloud, “it’s November, and freezing.”

“No, it’s not,” said Raven matter-of-factly. Charles caught a quick succession of images: thin beautiful ice on puddled rain, and snow crusting transparently on the webbing of ridged blue toes. A changeable reflection in the clear part of a windshield, haloed by frost’s ectoplasmic green.

“All right,” he said, “not freezing, then. But it is a bit nippy. Aren’t you cold?”

“I have a coat,” said Raven, which she did. It was very red. Charles thought the wool a little too bright, although he had to admit it looked nice on her.

“Yes, but…”

“No.”

“All right,” he said again. They had known each other then for something like eight months.

They were sitting in the only overgrown corner of the garden. (The gardener employed by the Xavier family was meticulous, but Charles was moreso.) Unladen vines described catenary loops over Raven’s bent head. Charles’ damp collar was beginning to stick.

“So,” she said, “do you want to try it first.”

Charles checked to make sure she hadn’t put anything in it, ignoring the fact that it had clearly been very effectively sealed for as long as it had been in her hands, and said, “Of course.”

He took a swig, and set the bottle down again, and swallowed. Raven watched him with eyes that were hazel today.

“That,” he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist, “was vile.”

Raven dissolved into laughter, high and clear.

“What? What?”

“Sorry,” she gasped, “it’s just, the-“

“The look on my face,” he supplied, irritated, sliding the words out from under thesleek surface of her amusement. Then he actually took a look at what the look on his face had been, and had to smile, although he tried to hide it with his hand.

“Yes,” Raven managed. “That.”

Her tone had changed, and Charles realized that in examining her immediate memories he’d missed a moment of transformation. Now she was blue, dark and glaucous in the shade cast by the hedge. The spilt wine from before was still there, after all: it glistened on the frilling of her shoulder, showed blotchily through the material of the too-large shirt she’d put earlier this afternoon.

“You looked like someone had taken tweezers to your tongue.”

Sometimes Charles regretted his telepathy. It made certain accusations very difficult to deny, for one. He settled for saying,

“You try some, then.”

Raven, who knew what it meant when Charles didn’t even try to argue, smiled an odd smile that was part triumph and part disappointment. “Okay.”

She took hold of the slender neck and had a sip. She didn’t wipe the mouth beforehand, Charles saw. He wondered if it would make him a sot if he commented. Probably.

“Well?”

“It’s not that bad,” she said, sucking thoughtfully at the inside of her cheek.

“Is too.”

“Is not.”

“It tastes like sick,” insisted Charles.

“A little,” Raven conceded. “But sick just tastes like food, really. Food, and the inside of your stomach.”

Charles gave up, and had another go. It did not taste better the second time round, any more than vomit did, but he was damned if he was going to be outclassed by a girl, even Raven. Especially Raven. The thing about Raven was that when she disagreed with him, or rejected his assertions offhand, it was not with the teasing gentleness of other kids; she meant every word, and spoke without inflection over a mental curl of contempt. So he tried not to be wrong around her, and when he was wrong he tried to be wrong with deeply impractical conviction.

Privately, he thought that being anything to Raven, whether wrong or right, was probably the most exciting thing he’d ever done.

“We should have gotten glasses,” said Raven, snatching the bottle back.

“No, then someone would have seen them.”

“Would they?”

Charles frowned. “I told you, Raven, I don’t like just taking people’s memories-“

“I meant, we could wash them afterwards,” said Raven, who hadn’t meant anything of the kind. It was an obvious solution, though, and Charles was embarrassed not to have thought of it.

“Never mind,” he said, “this is nicer. Sharing like this. Isn’t it?”

Raven looked doubtful. “Sure,” she said.

A few minutes passed in silence, broken only by the glug of liquid and the rustle of Raven’s thoughts. Charles didn’t try to pick out words, and was therefore very nearly surprised when she said, “This is nice. Everything, I mean.”

Her hand pressed up against the wet patch on her shirt, splaying over soaked cloth with a rasp where tiny spurs caught on the loose cotton weave. She had taken it from his closet. She had her own clothes- the maid’s shopping lists now twice as long, the maid pursing her mouth a little as she reached the point on the paper where once her neat handwriting would have run out- but she said they were always uncomfortable until she broke them in, starchy and close-fitting and stiff.

“You won’t break them in if you keep wearing mine instead,” Charles had observed, but he had never had anyone to lend a shirt to before, and besides: no one was going to see.

“I told you,” he said now, cheerfully. “I do believe I may be getting tipsy,” he added, in an official sort of tone.

Raven giggled. “It takes longer than that, stupid,” she said. “You have to wait for the fizz to sink in.”

As biological events went, that one sounded a little unlikely to Charles, but Raven had more experience than him in the area, he knew, even if it was all secondhand. And watching people do things, for someone like Raven, which was to say, Raven, could be quite close to doing them firsthand.

It was even closer was Charles, but he had never huddled in the alley behind a pub, looking out through spread fingers at the men who lurched out, or were thrown out, and picked themselves up with laborious care and slunk away, leaving a whiff of cheap cologne and expensive sin and the vivid impression of motion- their posture, how uncertainly they distributed their weight.

In those days, Raven had an eye for all of it; but especially for the frustrating pinkness of their hands in the dark.

Now they exchanged glances and a bottle of wine, the brush of their disparate fingertips going unmarked. Charles could taste Raven’s satisfaction at this upending of the world, and it was headier than the liquor.

Or maybe that was the fizz, well, sinking.

“It’s a good thing you bought two bottles,” he said, looking at the lowering level of liquid. Even its legs only reached two thirds of the way up the sides, a fast-disappearing sheen of red. “I don’t feel anything.”

He didn’t, actually. His hands were growing pleasantly numb, where they’d been cold. But it didn’t, in that moment, occur to him as something worth remarking on- probably because it would never have occurred to Raven.

And indeed “Hmm” was all she said in reply.

They went on like that, making steady progress against the depth of liquid left and the intensity of the air’s autumn chill, until Charles noticed that he was looking at himself.

For a moment he thought he’d slipped into Raven’s head when he wasn’t paying attention, was even now employing yolk-yellow eyes: he was halfway to forming an apology when he saw himself grin widely and melt.

“It’s more fun,” she said, “tipsy.”

“Are we tipsy now, then?”

Eyeroll. With her pupils pointing toward the inside of her head, only the lowermost decorative dark spot was visible beneath her eyelid, where it looked almost normal, amputated from the central strangeness. “Yes, Charles, we’re tipsy now.”

“Fantastic. Is this where I get to burst into song?”

She punched him in the arm. He swatted at her fist. There ensued a highly dignified interlude that ended with Raven holding Charles in a very brief headlock, leaves poky in both their hair. Normally Charles would have been immensely interested in the sensations accompanying a fight, the doubled interplay of action and intent, but right now all he could think about was that he was sure the triangle of pale sky visible through the encroaching brambles oughtn’t be spinning like that.

“I take it back,” said Raven. “I’m tipsy. You’re a lightweight.”

“This is my first time,” said Charles, indignantly. “When I’ve had more practice-“

“Then you’ll be an experienced lightweight,” said Raven, smugly.

Charles sulked.

“Uncle?” prompted Raven, after a minute. When Charles didn’t immediately respond, she loosened her grip until his head was resting in the crook of her shoulder and her arm was slung around his neck. He became aware of the coiled ridges that began just past the jut of her collarbone; they bit into his nape.

“It’s probably because of the way you are,” he said, importantly. “That you don’t get drunk so fast.”

Too late, he felt her stiffen.

“Why would that be?” she said, her voice too light, too quick, and Charles wants to take a tweezer to his tongue himself.

He drinks. “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. I was only joking.”

“Right,” said Raven.

In the cool vegetable gloom of the corner, her anger is a flare of prickling brightness.

“I mean, you’re… you’re blue, right,” said Charles, “and you can change into people. That doesn’t have anything to do with alcohol. If you have a, a high tolerance, that’s got to be natural.”

“This is natural,” said Raven, her elbow squirming against the side of his throat, from blue and lean to white and jiggly to brown and gnarled to blue.

“Yes,” said Charles, “yes, of course, but I mean- it’s normal, for people to be able to hold their liquor. It happens all the time.”

Raven didn’t move her arm. With one hand, much larger than her own, she uncorked the second bottle and held it to his chin.

“When I was three,” she said, “my mother used to give me a finger of beer in the evenings, to help me sleep.”

“Oh,” said Charles, stupidly. “I didn’t know.”

He really didn’t.

“Good,” said Raven. “I turned into- into this, about four years after that, I think.”

“I assumed you were born like that,” Charles admitted.

“Do you really think I would have lived, if I had?” said Raven, frankly.

Charles said nothing for a while. “Maybe if you’d hidden,” he said.

“Babies don’t hide,” said Raven. “That’s why they’re babies, and get held up as little miracles. Except when they aren’t.”

“Except when they are, you mean,” said Charles, with deeply impractical conviction.

It was Raven, then, who was quiet, inside and out.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”

The sky was pinkening gently, like the narrow areas of smoother skin on Raven’s face did, all marbled texture and slow bloom. The wind had probably begun to rise, but Charles felt warm, his stomach and throat burning, Raven solid and living-hot at his back.

“Do you remember what you looked like?” he said.

She did. She had been round-faced and sly-mouthed, with dark hair that hung straight and soft over her ears. She had liked making faces at herself in the mirror, back when she could only, really, make one single face.

“Do you remember what it was like before you started hearing people’s thoughts?” she said.

He did.

“Very,” he said, “very lonely.”

He still didn’t know exactly when the sea change had occurred. He’d narrowed it down to a window of about two weeks, but he could get no more precise than that. Books didn’t think, after all.

Raven was stricken.

“This is what I look like,” she said, turning until he could see three quarters of her face, her very near and very brilliant eye; and then, unbearably soft, “You’ll never be alone again, Charles. You won’t.”

Years later, when Hank McCoy had provided accidental confirmation of certain proposed effects of her mutation on Raven’s metabolism, and Charles had laid the photographs of the relevant slides carefully down on the arm of his wheelchair and leaned forward to discuss certain other matters of import, he would think about how that was not, even then, the same as saying she would never leave. And he would think about how he was not the only child in the universe who understood how to be wrong with all his heart.

In that moment, he looked back at her, unflinching. Said: “I know.”


End file.
